Remembering Vidal Sassoon

The beauty world lost an iconic and influential figure when Vidal Sassoon died today in his Los Angeles home. The legendary hairstylist was 84 years old. "Vidal Sassoon changed women's lives with his scissors, liberating them from a dependence on the beauty salon and the fussy attention devoted to hair," says Allure editor in chief Linda Wells. "Before Sassoon, women were slaves to rollers, bonnet hair-dryers, teasing combs, and hair spray. After Sassoon, they were free. He defined a new beauty in the 1960s and 1970s and gave women a sense of their own natural potential. Vidal Sassoon was a true maverick and visionary."

When Sassoon opened his first salon in London in 1954, he shocked clients by telling them they needed monthly appointments, not weekly ones. His geometric, wash-and-wear cuts didn't need elaborate setting or back-combing and caught on during the youth-quake of the 1960s. In 1964, the five-point cut that Sassoon gave Mary Quant, the designer of the miniskirt, became a sensation: "It was the epitome of nine years of work that led up to it," he said in the 2010 documentary Vidal Sassoon: The Movie. Soon Sassoon himself was a superstar, giving Mia Farrow her famous pixie for Rosemary's Baby. (He cut her hair in a boxing ring on the Paramount studio lot in 1967, with more than 100 photographers looking on.)

Sassoon went on to start one of the first stylist product lines (which he later sold) and even had his own talk show, Your New Day With Vidal Sassoon, in the early 1980s, on which he interviewed celebrity guests and regularly demonstrated his fitness prowess. An early adopter of Pilates, Sassoon could still touch his head to his knees at age 82, as he demonstrated in Vidal Sassoon. That same documentary delved into Sassoon's early years, revealing that he had lived in a London children's home from age 5 to 11. His single mother, Betty, visited him once a month (the maximum allowed) until she could bring him home permanently. It was his mother who first saw her son as a hairstylist—she told him she had seen it in a dream. As a teenager during the Second World War, Sassoon got a job as a shampoo boy at a salon in a Jewish neighborhood in London. Jewish himself, he joined the 43 Group, an organization that objected to the British Union of Fascists, a new political party with Nazi sympathies. When he was beaten at a protest, he explained his bruises by telling customers, "I tripped over a hairpin."

Sassoon is survived by his daughter Eden, sons David and Elan Sassoon, and his fourth wife, Rhonda "Ronny" Sassoon. His daughter Catya died in 2002.